The Myth of the Strong Leader

Archie Brown promises an argumentative book and he does not disappoint. The case he presents is clear: so-called ‘strong leaders’ generally prove ineffective. This is because ‘strong’ typically means an inability to accept collective decision-making. However, despite historical experience, a substantial body of contemporary opinion, including of serious political commentators, persists in equating ‘strong’ leadership with effective leadership. The aim of this book is to dispel this myth and it does so by drawing on a wide range of examples, illustrative of 20th-century regimes categorised as democratic, revolutionary, authoritarian and totalitarian.

The range of leaders subject to analysis is of necessity selective and one can also question Brown’s categorisation of leadership types. The most effective he labels ‘transformational’, as they played a decisive role in introducing systemic change. In this category he includes Adolfo Suárez, De Gaulle, Gorbachev, Deng Xiaoping and Mandela. Next down come the ‘redefining’ leaders, a category that also includes three British prime ministers, Asquith, Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. Their governments shifted the political centre of gravity of the country. Of the three, Brown is especially admiring of Attlee, on account of his mastery of collective government and capacity to entertain the possibility that others might know better. It is for Thatcher’s inability to do either that Brown is less than fulsome in his praise of her premiership, despite his acknowledgement of her importance in engaging with Gorbachev. Other examples cited in this book extend to non-democratic regimes the argument that collective-style leadership tends to prove more effective, while conversely showing that the worst blunders occur when non-democratic leaders act autocratically. Stalin’s misreading of Hitler’s intentions in early 1941, Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ launched in 1958 and Khrushchev’s deployment of missiles to Cuba in 1962 are highlighted as ‘bad’ examples drawn from the Communist states.

President Kennedy’s performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis would tend to challenge many of the book’s conclusions and it is therefore a pity that Brown does not look at this episode in greater depth from the US perspective. Arguably, the US president acted in precisely the manner that Brown finds so reprehensible in leaders like Blair, whom he dismisses as one of Britain’s top three 20th-century foreign policy blunderers (the other two being Chamberlain and Eden). Did not Kennedy, like Blair, ignore expert military advice and also bypass formal governmental structures? Yet while in Kennedy’s case such actions prevented war, in Blair’s they led to Britain’s participation in one. Brown’s response, one suspects, would be to point to another argument made in this book, namely that good leadership cannot be reduced to a set of immutable principles that apply in every context. A leadership style that was effective in Washington in 1962 was not necessarily appropriate in Westminster and Whitehall in 2003.

This is an eminently readable and indeed convincing book, not least because it avoids reducing ‘good’ leadership practice to a set of dogmatic formula or list of general principles. Instead, it convinces by more modestly framing the argument in terms of balance of probabilities: yes, sometimes ‘strong’ leaders meet with success, but more often they suffer setbacks or create disasters. The weight of evidence provided by the history of the 20th-century, as presented here, is so overwhelming that it remains a mystery why so many should continue to think otherwise.

Michael Rowe is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, King’s College London.

http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2014/09/myth-strong-leader